


in the chillest land and on the strangest sea

by imperfectcircle, raven (singlecrow)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cover Art, M/M, No Season 5 Spoilers, not a fix-it but a delay-it, s1-s4, scottish cabin fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:55:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24811162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperfectcircle/pseuds/imperfectcircle, https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/raven
Summary: Jon remembers a statement he read years ago given by a Jesuit priest, who said that the shortest prayer he knew was, just,fuck it, as infuck it; it's in God's hands. He takes Daisy's hand and trails on after her.or; hope is a thing with feathers.
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 194
Kudos: 510
Collections: RaeLynn's Epic Rec List





	in the chillest land and on the strangest sea

**Author's Note:**

> Many beta thanks to the excellent soupytwist -- all mistakes, however, remain ours! 
> 
> The skin for this work changes the font of some of the text to Times New Roman (or another serif font if your computer doesn't have TNR) to help distinguish different settings. However, the story should make sense without it.

This place is called Càrn na Marbh, for the stones of the dead. Jon is not out here for the ghosts, though he sometimes thinks he hears them to the north of the village, walking the same sand and shoreline they knew in life. Their voices drift in and out of his awareness, alongside the scent of vetch and meadowsweet. He's not afraid of them, or of anything else. For now, for the span of these quiet, unnumbered days, fear has been displaced by stillness.

"If you're going to kill me," he says, "I wish you'd get along and do it."

Daisy steps out of the trees by the water's edge, a dark figure silhouetted against the glimmer of the loch.

"If I was going to kill you, you'd already be dead," she says. "Where's Martin?"

"In the house." Jon gestures behind him at where it's just visible, sitting squat and ugly in the dimness. It never really gets dark here, even in the close depths of the Highland night. Something of the water's shimmer persists at the horizon, never getting any closer, no matter how much you move towards it, but never any further away. " _Your_ house, I guess."

"But he's with you?" Daisy asks, urgently.

"Yes."

" _With_ you?" Daisy insists. Jon nods and her smile is briefly luminous. His own is probably not much different. "About time, you daft wanker. Come on."

"Come on where?" Jon asks. "Daisy, what are you doing here? What the hell is going on?"

But she doesn't answer, holding out a hand to him to help him scrabble up from the dip of the shore. Jon remembers a statement he read years ago given by a Jesuit priest, who said that the shortest prayer he knew was, just, _fuck it_ , as in _fuck it; it's in God's hands_. He takes Daisy's hand and trails on after her. In the house, the lights are still on but Martin has fallen asleep, his head uncomfortably pillowed on the arm of the sofa. Jon bends down to kiss him without thinking, and then looks up to see Daisy watching him, her eyes steady and kind.

"Make us some tea, will you?" she says. "We don't have much time. Top shelf at the back."

"Daisy," Jon says, helplessly, but again, this seems to be what's happening to him now. The top shelf at the back turns out to harbour a hip flask still full of whisky, thick with years of dust. Daisy tips a generous measure into each mug of tea, and waves Jon away from pouring a third one. 

"Martin won't wake up," she says. "He can't. Sit down and shut up."

Jon doesn't. "What do you mean, _can't wake up_?"

It's suddenly occurred to him that she was able to avoid answering his questions. In a moment, he's making the desperate calculation: if Daisy has been taken by the Hunt or something else, he doesn't have an earthly chance of holding her off, but he could scream in momentary resistance, wake Martin and give him a chance to run. 

But Daisy holds up her hands in supplication, and he recognises the soft look on her face, from when they were camping in the Archive and she was making him listen to the Archers. He breathes out.

"I'm sorry, I'm doing this all wrong," she says, when she's sure he won't bolt. "Martin is fine, I promise. He's just… sleeping. Sit down."

Jon sits cross-legged on the floor, mug cradled in both hands. Daisy is looking down at Martin, still soundly asleep, seemingly undisturbed by their talk and clatter.

"He loves you," she says, in a clinical tone that makes Jon think for a moment that something else is speaking through her. "He has always loved you, for better or worse, no matter how badly you treated him. He can see you for what you are, now, and he still loves you." 

Jon gets up, finds one of the threadbare blankets this house has so few of and lays it gently over Martin. In lieu of facing down the Hunt for him, it will do as a gesture of affection. Martin stirs but does not wake, and Jon's heart beats steady in his chest.

"That's my thing," he says mildly, sitting back down. "The whole omniscient narration bit. You'd better start telling me what this is about."

"A long time ago, I tried to give you something," Daisy says, dropping down to join him on the floor. "But I couldn't, and then it was too late. And now it seems like it isn't, so I came. I give it, oh, about seven hours till dawn. Until the Hunt comes for me."

Jon glances at his phone. It's nearly midnight, the night now settled to stillness around them. Earlier, he told Martin he was putting out the recycling – the good people at the Highland Council are unimpressed at the steepness of the hill and have insisted they carry it down – but he was out there by the water's edge because he could feel something out there in the darkness, a presence tugging at his mind. He can feel it now, brooding but not malevolent. He has the sense that whatever Daisy is here for, whatever strangeness that's about to come for him in this low light with the cups of tea and the sound of Martin's breathing, it's like the water's shimmer, that fragile luminosity. Something in the darkness that never gets closer, or further away. 

"Are you about to give me a statement?" he asks. The tape recorder is at his hand, wedged under the sofa. "Statement of Alice 'Daisy' Tonner, concerning…"

Daisy takes the tape recorder from him and rewinds it back to the beginning, then stops the tape. She gets her phone out of her pocket and opens the audio recording app. "Statement regarding Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. A gift from a friend."

There's no sound of spooling tape to fill the silence. Only the wind through the pines, Martin's breathing, and the sea.

"This is a story," Daisy says, "about you."

*

Martin appears to have assigned you a mug. You have no idea why — tea hardly tastes different based on its container — but you're dimly aware it’s a very Martin thing to do. Inefficient, sentimental, of no real value, you think to yourself, but probably well-intentioned. The sort of thing that has endeared Martin to Tim and Sasha. Back then, this is a thought that does not cause you pain.

The mug is green with little cartoon sheep on it. One of the sheep is wearing sunglasses. You're not going to ask why the mug or why the sheep. The mug is large and sturdy, and has survived this long, which you can’t help but consider a positive trait.

Today, Martin brings you tea in the assigned mug and a very much unassigned file.  
  


"Daisy," Jon says, skipping over _that's not true_ or _how could you know that_. Everything she said is accurate, chiming with his memory like the second part to a chord. "What is this? Why are you telling me this?"

"We don't have much time," Daisy says, again. She reaches up to open a window and lets in the cold, scented air. "Jon, listen to me. There's something out there in the dark. I know you can feel it."

Jon wants to say he can't feel any such thing. But he forces himself to hold off, to breathe, to think about why he chose to go out into the night on his own even before Daisy found him.

"Yes," he says. "What is it?"

"You could call it it," Daisy says, and hesitates. "Well. You could call it a thing with feathers."

Jon has half-formed thoughts about eider ducks and eagles before landing on Emily Dickinson. For an absurd moment, he wants to complain that that isn't fair, it's Martin who knows about poetry. "You mean," he says, but Daisy puts a finger on his lips.

"Don't say it," she says. "Not yet."

Jon doesn't understand, but doesn't speak, or shake off her touch. 

"I need to tell you the whole thing first," Daisy says. "Will you let me?"

It seems as though the world around inhales with expectation. Jon nods and Daisy goes on.  
  


“Um,” Martin says, handing over neither, just standing there with the mug in one hand, the file in the other, and a look on his face you can't decipher. In hindsight, it could have been some distant cousin of determination.

“Yes, Martin?”

“I brought you tea?” Martin says. “And. Um. So, hear me out.”

Martin hands you the tea but not the file. He fails to elaborate.

“It would be easier to hear you out if you gave me something to hear,” you say. Back when you started at the Institute, you used to wonder idly if this was all a ruse and Martin was actually a suave, Bond-like spy lulling you all into a false sense of security. You joked with Tim about it, once, long ago. It was never a particularly funny joke, though, and it lost even its vague humour the moment Jane Prentiss took an interest in him. “What is it, Martin?”

“Sometimes I read the discredited statements to help me sleep,” Martin says all in a rush. “It doesn’t really help, but I’ve got to try something, and at least there are plenty of them lying around?”

Has Martin brought you a discredited statement? For a moment you're almost interested. Could this be a clue to Prentiss that you've missed? Some piece of the supernatural puzzle that Martin’s recent experiences have left him able to spot?

“And I know they’re not _useful_ ,” Martin continues, indicating that this is not going to be the missing bit of information that saves you all from horrible messy deaths. “But. I thought. Well. You spend so much time reading horrible accounts of horrible things happening to people, it might be good for you to read a nice one occasionally?”

You feel something tug in your chest. You decide it must be second-hand embarrassment.  
  


"Daisy!" Jon is trying to curl up into himself, pressed back against the sofa and hugging his knees.

"Oh, is it _uncomfortable_?" Daisy takes a sip of her tea. "Someone knowing your every stupid thought and feeling, whether or not you want them to? How terrible for you, shut up."

"It wasn't," Jon says into his hands. "It wasn't _stupid_."

Daisy pats him on the arm, and continues.  
  


“You brought me a _nice_ statement?” you ask.

Martin clutches the statement but doesn’t deny it. You can’t tell if he’s hurt, apologetic, or constipated. You don't care. Or perhaps you don't want to care? 

You sigh. You think you will never understand how someone like Martin exists in the world, assigning mugs to people and looking for comfort in the discredited rambling of strangers.

You hold out a hand. “Okay. I’ll read it. Thank you, Martin. That’s very thoughtful of you.”

“You will?” Martin stops. Starts again. “I mean, good! Good. I hope it helps, at least a little.”

You decide not to notice the slight tremor in Martin’s hand as he gives you the file. Lack of sleep and constant fear of worms would do that to anyone. You might as well try to give Martin what little dignity can still be salvaged from this situation.

You have already recorded one statement on tape today, but all that means is that the recorder is right there. No time like the present, you think, to waste fifteen minutes indulging your subordinate’s whims. At least it’s short.

> Statement of Nick Potter, regarding his late mother and her late dog. Original statement given June 12th 2013. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. 
> 
> Statement begins.
> 
> My mum died last year. She had a good life, a long life, and if you have to go, you could do a lot worse than she did. It was quick, but we all got a chance to say goodbye. To tell her we loved her.
> 
> She loved spooky stories, you know? Ghosts, ghouls, vampires, you name it. And this isn’t that kind of story — no creepy footprints in the snow, no bloody hand reaching through a mirror — but it’s weird. Strange. So I thought I could give it to you, and even if it’s not a proper spooky story, you can put it with them. My last gift to my mum, getting a tiny piece of her filed next to all the things that go bump in the night.
> 
> Anyway, my mum, she had this dog, Clipper. She got him when dad died — she said she needed something to get her out of the house, to keep her from sitting around moping all day.
> 
> It worked. She loved Clipper, and he loved her, and before you knew it mum was out walking again, much more than before, taking Clipper to parks and canals and forests and anywhere he might find something interesting to sniff or something gross to roll in.
> 
> She loved my dad. She did. And they were happy, I think. I hope. But dad was ill for a while before he died, and that took its toll on her. So yeah, she grieved him, and she missed him, but there was a lightness to her once she got used to being on her own. She had Clipper, and she had time, and she was going to make the best of the life she had left.
> 
> She and Clipper got old together, I guess you could say? By the time he turned ten, she was in her mid-eighties. Both of them had pretty serious arthritis at that point, and I think he started to have something wrong with his feet around the time her eyesight got to be a real problem.
> 
> They didn’t mind, though? Or if they did, they found ways to stay cheerful. Mum loved life. She’d come round for Sunday lunch every week and have us in stitches with stories about her feuding neighbours or the latest gossip from the district nurse, all the while with Clipper curled up at her feet getting snuck food off her plate like we couldn't all see her doing it.
> 
> One day she asked me to drive her over to Victoria Park. She used to take Clipper there all the time, back when both of them could walk that far. It was his favourite park, she said, and she wanted him to soak in some happy memories.
> 
> That was mum for you. Loved that dog. She brought us mini chocolate Swiss rolls to eat there — they were always my favourites — and got Clipper a brand new bone for the occasion.
> 
> So I’ve sat mum down on the bench, Clipper’s at her feet, sniffing the bench legs and wagging his stubby little tail, and mum gets out this ball. It’s old and rubbery and bright sky blue, like a tiny moment of a perfect summer’s sky captured in a ratty dog toy, and the moment Clipper sees it his eyes light up.
> 
> Mum can’t throw a ball anymore, but that’s okay, I thought, because Clipper can’t run for one either.
> 
> But here’s where it gets weird. Mum stands up — without my help — and just lobs that ball. Throws it a good fifty metres, maybe more. And Clipper, who hasn’t moved faster than a sedentary walk in years, runs off after it like he’s a puppy.
> 
> Clipper brings the ball back, mum bends down — still without any help from me — and takes it off him, and away they go again. Mum never had much of an arm on her, but she’s throwing that ball like there’s no tomorrow, and Clipper is chasing after it, and the two of them are so happy I feel like I’ve been given a gift just getting to be near them.
> 
> After a while Clipper decides enough is enough, he wants to sniff some more things, and mum sits back down, and the two of them are back to their normal pace, slow and shaky. Mum needs my help to get back off the bench when it’s time to go home.
> 
> We don’t talk about it, there’s no need, but we’re both smiling as I drive her home.
> 
> Mum had her fall maybe month later? There were a couple of bad days, but then we got her transferred to a hospice and they made her comfortable. My sister flew back from Berlin with her kids, and me and my lot were already here, of course. We all got to tell her how much we loved her, and I promised to take good care of Clipper, and, you know, it could have been a lot worse?
> 
> When it was my turn to speak with her alone, I didn’t say much, but I held her hand and told her she’d been the best mum I could have asked for, and that I would take that dog to Victoria Park any time he wanted to go. She laughed at that, and told me I was the best son she could have asked for, and if I didn’t take care of Clipper she would haunt me in the shower.
> 
> And that’s it. That’s my statement. My elderly mum took her elderly dog to the park and for half an hour, they could move easily and play all the fetch they wanted. It was like magic.
> 
> Statement ends.

  
“Well,” you tell the tape recorder. “That certainly was ‘nice’. Perhaps Martin thinks that when Jane Prentiss tries to kill us all we can play a friendly game of fetch.

“Calling this a discredited statement almost cheapens the other discredited statements. At least most of them make an effort to be unsettling, even if they often fail to achieve it.

“Still. I’m glad Martin has found something to help him sleep. And I suppose it was a pleasant enough story, if dull.”

You shut off the recorder, and automatically your hands continue the familiar motions of winding it back and pressing play to check the quality of the recording, even though this is about as far from a genuine statement as it's possible for you to imagine. 

You scoff quietly to yourself when the tape plays you back nothing but static. It's annoying, but with the age of these recorders, it's hardly a surprise that they'd break eventually. Still, it's an odd stroke of luck, that the first statement to be ruined by the mundane failings of aging technology is one that doesn't merit re-recording. You wonder if you should thank Martin for that. 

The statement does not help you sleep — your nightmares are getting worse — but you find yourself thinking about it at odd times. On a whim, you give everyone Friday afternoon off, tell them to go sit in a park and enjoy the clear blue skies. Tim asks if you're dying. Sasha spams you with pictures of the ducks in St James's Park. And Martin, though you don't know it at the time, takes flowers to his mother. She refuses to see him, but for once accepts the flowers.  
  


On cue, Martin shifts in his sleep, mutters something, settles again.

"You said he wouldn't wake up," Jon says. "Why not?"

Daisy gives Martin a fond look. "He's played his part. So have all the others. It's my turn now, and then in the morning it's yours."

"In the morning?" Jon says, but tonight she doesn't have to answer his questions. She goes on. 

*

"I've found another statement," Melanie says, a few weeks after she came to see you about the Cambridge Military Hospital. She's looking for war ghosts in the Archive, for how people and places absorb violence. You remember this as though from a great distance, consumed by thoughts of the tunnels, of Gertrude's death and the shadows that seem to be at the edge of everything you see. "I need your help with it."

You look up as she tosses the statement in front of you. "You want me to record it?"

"If you like." Melanie sits on the edge of your desk and starts pocketing your pens. "Look, it's just, it's different, all right? I can't say how, before you ask. I guess it just didn't make me feel like shit, which is pretty weird around here."

"But it’s a ghost story?" you ask. 

"Yeah," Melanie says. "Just… do your spooky thing. It might help."

She doesn't say what it might help _with_. You shrug and wait for her to leave, but she doesn't. Instead, she moves on to your stapler and hole punch, some paperclips and a stray Curly Wurly that someone –– not someone, Martin –– left for you.

"Melanie?" you say, after a moment. "Why are you stealing all my stationery?"

“Because it winds you up,” Melanie says. “And now I’m going out for drinks with your ex-girlfriend, who quite frankly was much too good for you anyway.”

You laugh, which clearly surprises her. “I hope you’re not expecting me to disagree with you on that.”

She looks miffed, which you find oddly endearing. She stuffs most of your paperclips into her coat pocket and says, “Read it, okay.”

When you do get to reading it, you have trouble. It won't record to tape, for one thing, and it makes you feel self-conscious and strange. It might be because you're used to the crackle and static of the tape recorder, and the silent digital background unnerves you. It may be that you're already unnerved. But you remember that look on Melanie's face –– that moment of surprise that you can take a joke, laugh at yourself like anyone else might –– and you keep trying.

> Statement of Raphael Dryden, regarding a storm. Original statement given 23 June, 1997. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. 
> 
> Statement begins.
> 
> Do you remember the Great Storm? October 1987, the one where Michael Fish went on the telly the day before and said, to the lady who rang up the BBC to ask if there was a hurricane on the way: don't worry, there isn't. 
> 
> People did do that in those days. They rang the BBC to ask them things. The night the Wall fell, my mum called them to ask what the capital of Germany was going to be from now on. It had come up in Trivial Pursuit, apparently. My dad said that the nuclear reality they'd carried with them their whole lives, the Cold War, the global superpowers, all the rest of it, was crumbling around them and she was worried about Trivial Pursuit, of all things. 
> 
> To be fair to Michael Fish, it wasn't a hurricane, just a storm. And to be fair to my mum, I guess you can't see the shape of what's happening when it's already happening to you; all you see is the wind and the rain and the twigs battering against the glass, and it's not until afterwards that you see how much was uprooted, how much was changed. The night of the Great Storm, I was worried about the cat getting out, and about the yew tree in the St Barnabas graveyard. 
> 
> I'm a sexton, which isn't a word a lot of people know any more. There's no sex involved, just to be clear, and much less comedy gravedigging than Shakespeare would have you believe. They get in a contractor to dig the actual graves these days anyway, with the proper tools and equipment. The vicar does all the ceremonial stuff. I just… keep an eye on things. Lock up at night, keep the gates oiled. Make sure there's enough room for the dead. I suppose your next question is how an old queen ends up in deepest darkest Northumberland, in an ancient churchyard that's trying its best to crumble into the sea. The truth is, I'm not sure myself. I did cabaret in West Berlin, before the Wall fell, but you can't live by sequins and glitter forever and the Lord found me other work for my dotage. I suppose one man in his time plays many parts.
> 
> The yew was at least eight hundred years old, probably more. Yews are evil trees, so they say; something about that gloomy green foliage, the berries as red as blood. And yews like churchyards, too, spreading their roots out beneath headstones and graves, which a lot of people find disturbing. But I always had a sneaking fondness for that tree. Like me, it was an old thing, just trying to cling to the rocks on which it had found itself, and my worry that night was at least a little bit for the tree, as well as for the church. Quite a lot for the church, though. The problem was that centuries-old root system, tangled up with the stones and mortar. If the tree went over, it would take the church walls and the roof with it, come down with a smash into the pews, lay poison berries on the altar as though making its own sacrifice. And the other thing you must understand: it's not a metaphor, that the ground here is crumbling. Beyond the low graveyard wall is some scrubland, some windblown gorse and the span of a dangerous, rocky path, and then nothing but the cliff edge. The storm came from the North Sea, all that might of wind and water, and we were the first thing it hit. 
> 
> So I was worried. About the cat, and the yew tree, and the storm. I sat there by the kitchen window, watched the sweep of the lighthouse over the bay and listened to the howl of wind and the static on the radio. At about five o'clock in the morning I had a fit of stupidity and went out. You don't need to tell me what a reckless, bone-headed thing it was to do. All I can say is, like my mum and Trivial Pursuit, you don't understand the weight of the thing while it's happening. I put on my raincoat and boots and hat, as though they'd help, and went out into the churchyard. There was a little light in the sky and I thought, like an idiot, that it might be the lighthouse on Holy Island, or the dawn.
> 
> The yew tree was halfway there. Not upright, not horizontal, but balanced at an angle with some of its roots in the air. The light came from the ghosts. Dozens of them, holding hands, in a ring around that tree. I could see it rocking in the wind, with sometimes only a few feet between its outermost branches and the roof of the church, but it never made contact. Not with those ethereal figures, lit from within by some unknowable force, holding it in place against the storm. I stood there, looking at them with their ghostly hands outstretched, and I wasn't afraid. If you've ever been on the stage, perhaps you know the feeling: that you'll find your light, that the audience will applaud, that mostly, people want to laugh and sing along. It'll be all right on the night. When the rain in my eyes got too much I went back inside, but I watched from the window for a long time, the glowing ring of light, the church, and the tree.
> 
> In the morning, the storm had passed, the ghosts were gone and the tree was still standing. When it finally went over, three days later and emphatically in the other direction, it left the church unscathed. But it brought up the dead. Like I said, after hundred of years, the roots had worked their way through the ground, and they'd moved the corpses from their assigned places and into the underground body of the tree. It would have been macabre, grotesque, and to tell you the truth it was a bit, but… look, the thing is, graveyards aren't terrible places. Not really. We're not animals. We tend to our dead. Nearly everyone in the graveyard would have gone there sooner, if it weren't for someone who kept them safe as long as they could. Some things outlast the storm. 
> 
> That's it. That's the story. I saw some ghosts, and I think they saved us from a truly gigantic church roof appeal. We did re-inter the bodies, of course. The vicar was all for having a proper Christian burial service, with the candles and the singing, but the local pagan society objected: they pointed out that the graveyard pre-dates the church and there were certainly people in there who'd rather not hear all about the angels and the life everlasting. Then the local historical society said there was at least one person in the village before 1600 with the surname Al-Qadr, and that put a nail in the coffin – sorry – of the Christian burial idea. That was for the best, I think, not to mention how we've all got things in our pants and in our heads the Church sometimes doesn't understand. So they put them back in the ground, and said a few words, and let the sea-spray and the rain be whatever other ceremony they needed. I never saw the ghosts again, so I guess they were happy with that. And we haven't had another storm.
> 
> Statement ends.

  
It takes you a long time to read this statement, a paragraph at a time, painful and awkward. On the digital recording, you sound distracted, half-there. You send Melanie a copy and you can tell she thinks it's odd; it's as though you set out, deliberately, not to do the spooky thing. But in the two weeks it takes you to read it, you live with it, and feel better for it: London is full of small old churches, battered old graveyard walls, men in their time playing many parts. Each time something reminds you, you think again of the tree that chose just the right time to fall.

You finish recording the statement on a Friday. When you wake up on Saturday, the weekend stretching out empty and unappealing ahead of you, you decide to fill it with something different. You make the journey up north on a half-empty train, watching through the smeared window glass as the train creeps along the Northumberland coast. You find the church, which is just where the statement said it was, on the landward side of Lindisfarne with the causeway visible as a white gleam across the water. The church is weathered and ancient, but not bleak; there are rainbow stickers in the windows of the vicarage and the sacristy, and bright banners hang off the noticeboard. The place feels as alive, as vivid, as the smash of the sea on the rocks below. It occurs to you that Martin would have liked this place: its beauty, its remoteness from the constrained world you both live in now. You go back to London feeling hopeful and quiet. It doesn't last, but the place is still lovely in your memory, the prospect of sea and sky. You think one day you'll go back. I hope you do."  
  


"Maybe I will," Jon says. "I wish you could come with me."

"Yeah," Daisy says, "I wish that too."

He can hear it, the strain in her voice, the presence of the thing she's fighting off. When Jon thinks of the Hunt, he remembers kneeling in the dirt. The weight of her boot on the back of his neck; the cloth she stuffed in his mouth so he couldn't scream. Whatever this is, this thing with feathers out in the darkness, it's keeping her here with him, for one last night.

"Daisy," he says, just to say her name, a verbal caress. "Go on."  
  


Now you know Martin left school at seventeen, he's started to make more sense to you. Not the tea or the fussing — both of them remain inexplicable — but when you take more care to distinguish between academic rigour and actual competence, you begin to see the shape of the latter masked by the absence of the former.

Be that as it may, you're still unclear on why he has brought you another discredited statement along with its digital recording.

"It's nice?" he offers when you challenge him. "I know, I know, 'I don't have time for nice, I'm too busy making mysterious recordings and hiding an extra laptop where I think no one can see,'" he says in a deep, posh voice that absolutely doesn't make one corner of your mouth quirk up slightly. "Think of it as a compromise? You won't let us help you, fine, but you could at least have a more balanced diet of statements?"

The irony of his word choice is lost on both of you for now.

"This is by way of adding some fibre?" you ask, allowing a tiny hint of whimsy to penetrate the thick layers of paranoia, guilt and fear that surround you. "One of my five a day?"

Martin hesitates before answering. "Yes? I mean, yes." Then, tentative but hopeful: "It's rich in antioxidants?"

You are very good at refusing help, but very bad at refusing this. "Very well, Martin."

"Thank you." He gives you the file, puts two nutrigrain bars down on top of it. "Um. Tim does care, you know? That's why he's being so _Tim_ about it all. But you could—"

You brush him off before he can suggest something truly horrific like _talking to someone_. You may even thank him for the file, anything to get him out of the room before he starts bringing up feelings. The only feeling that matters is the one driving you to find out how to stop the Not Them before it kills again; you don't have time for any others.

You don't read the statement right away, because you really are busy and you really don't have time for nice, but it sits on your desk long enough that by the time you notice it beneath the empty nutrigrain wrappers and your own scrappy case notes, you feel a twinge of something you don't care to name. 

"Statement of Chaya Markowitz," you say, though you are not recording this one. "Original statement given December 21st 2014. Statement begins.

"My old boss looks exactly like Bill Nighy." 

The words are flat and uninspired, no more alive than the ones you use to order a takeaway or refuse your colleagues' attempts to help you. Nothing seizes you. Nothing comes through you. They're just words. 

You try again. 

"My old boss looks exactly like Bill Nighy."

If reading the statement Melanie gave you was like wading through thick treacle, this is like drowning in it. 

"My old boss looks exactly like Bill Nighy. You know, the actor guy from Love, Actually and Pirates of the Caribbean?" 

You're exhausted after two sentences. You switch on a recorder in case that helps, but it runs out of battery a few moments later and switches off again. 

You are nothing if not bloody minded — and now it's a challenge. 

"My old boss looks exactly like Bill Nighy," you force out in your own dull voice. "You know, the actor guy from Love, Actually and Pirates of the Caribbean? You'd know him if you saw him — he's got one of those faces."

You stop. 

You've been silent for a few minutes when Martin knocks, enters bearing tea and a bag of pistachios. 

You thank him for one and give the other a suspicious look. 

"Um. You're not, are you allergic? Sorry, sorry."

He looks so worried and flustered that you take the bag from him. "No, Martin, I'm not allergic. Why pistachios?"

You're expecting him to stutter something about how they're 'nice', but instead he says, "They're easy to snack on? When I'm not feeling like food I can just pick at them without paying attention, and sometimes I end up eating some by accident." 

You have an unwanted image of Martin sitting sadly alone somewhere, picking listlessly at pistachios and staring off into empty, uncaring space. You don't like it at all. 

"Yes, well," you say, because nothing else will come out. "Thank you."

Martin tries to smile at you. It doesn't really work, but it has a certain charm. He looks down at your desk rather than meet your eyes, and his gaze must land on your work.  
  


"This is excruciating," Jon says.

Daisy grins at him, all teeth. "Good."  
  


"Oh! Are you reading the Bill Nighy statement?" he asks. 

"I'm trying," you say. "I think I might be —" You're not sure how to phrase it. "— losing my voice?"

That, you realise immediately, was an unforced error. Now Martin will fuss for days, bringing you ginger tea and strepsils and trying to lend you one of his many lumpy scarves. 

"Why are you reading it out loud?"

Oh. Well. When he puts it like that, you don't have an answer. _Because it was hard,_ is the truthful answer, though perhaps a bit too revealing for a Thursday afternoon. "Habit?" you offer instead. 

He smiles at you — a real one — and you get the strongest sense that if you were both different people he might try to pat your hand. 

"Well, don't waste your voice on my account," he says. "I just thought you might like the story."

You thank him again, which he reads correctly as a dismissal, and consider the statement in front of you in silence.

> My old boss looks exactly like Bill Nighy. You know, the actor guy from Love, Actually and Pirates of the Caribbean? You'd know him if you saw him — he's got one of those faces. 
> 
> When I say he looks exactly like Bill Nighy, I mean when I walked into my interview and saw him sitting there I nearly turned round and walked straight out again, convinced this was some low budget prank for a Saturday night game show. 
> 
> It's a common reaction. I'm not great at reading people's faces, but it turns out there is actually a face that means, _What's Bill Nighy doing in a meeting about non-mains sewage draining?_ Mostly they do what I did, which is swallow their confusion and start talking about the technical specifications for discharges to surface water, but occasionally they shift to another, equally recognisable face that means, _Oh, Bill Nighy is researching a role in environmental planning? I can be cool about this._
> 
> They're rarely cool about it. 
> 
> We had kind of a Bill Nighy Swear Jar. If he was out alone during working hours and someone accosted him for a photo or an autograph or whatever, he'd put a pound in when he got back to the office. But if you were out with him when it happened, then you had to put a pound in — or, if you were senior management, a fiver. 
> 
> The thing I never realised until I started that job is, along with all the selfies and _I preferred your earlier work_ s, celebrities also get a lot of people telling you really serious things. I guess I should have known; I like to think I'm pretty blasé about famous people, but I once cried thanking Fiona Shaw for making it easier for me to come out to my mum. 
> 
> It was never for the things you'd think, either. The real Bill Nighy has had so many serious and moving roles, but it was always someone coming up to my old boss to tell him about the time they were getting chemotherapy and the only thing that made them laugh was Kiss Me Kate, or some new parent whose baby would only go to sleep listening to episodes of the Charles Paris Murder Mysteries. Trust me, you work with my old boss, you get very familiar with the real Bill Nighy's back catalogue. 
> 
> One time we were coming back from a three hour pan-London sanitary sewer overflow workshop, which is more interesting than it sounds, and someone on the tube shook his hand and told him how they'd been so horribly bullied at school that they'd thought about ending their own life, but what had kept them going was a planned trip to see Arcadia at the National at the end of term. He did what he always does when he can't correct them before they start speaking, which was thank them sincerely and tell them how truly honoured he was. He always means it, too. 
> 
> That time, I put ten pounds in the Bill Nighy jar. 
> 
> The funny thing about that jar was things bought with the money from it always seemed to last a little longer or be a little better than you'd expect. When it was used to buy the first round at the pub, it kind of made sense that the cash would stretch further — I wasn't the only one to stuff a note into the jar rather than a coin on occasion. But if it was a hot day in the office and you used Bill Nighy money to buy a round of choc ices for the team, somehow they'd never melt and they'd always taste just like you remembered from when you were a child. Or the two cute little cactuses we bought with Bill Nighy money that flourished even though I'm certain we overwatered them. 
> 
> It got to the point that whenever someone left, as well as having a whip round for a leaving gift, you'd also buy them something small with Bill Nighy money. It was kind of a superstition, you could say, though I don't think we called it that. 
> 
> When I left, they got me a big bunch of flowers with the whip round money, and a cute little Embankment Station fridge magnet, which is a sewage system in-joke.
> 
> I had the magnet on my fridge for a while, and I swear the food in there lasted longer and tasted better than it has before or since. Then I put it on the filing cabinet at my new job, and everything I kept in there stayed in place and never got damaged or messy or anything, which I call a genuine miracle. Once I stored some headphones in there and the wires didn't tangle. 
> 
> Now I sleep with it under my pillow. I don't think it's some sort of magical protection against all ills — if I'm going to die in my sleep, a fridge magnet won't stop me — but I'll tell you this, it's been six weeks since I put it under my pillow, and I haven't had a single bad dream.

  
You can see why Martin liked this statement. You sweep a dozen or so pistachio shells into the bin and put the statement back in its file. It may not help with your work, but you do feel a bit more balanced after this, a bit better prepared to face whatever comes next. 

"That night, for the first time in a very long while, you sleep without – _fuck_."

"Without dreaming," Jon says. His voice is shaking, but he's managing to hold perfectly still. "I remember. If you really have to kill someone, it's me, not him, all right?"

Slowly, Daisy removes her hands from around his throat. She didn't tighten her grip, or leave a mark, but her eyes are frighteningly distant. "Jon, I'm so sorry," she says. "I'm really – time is…"

"Running out. Yes." When he's as sure as he can be that moving won't make her go for him again, he takes both of her hands in his and grips tightly. "Time for a break."

"Yeah," Daisy says, taking her time before she lets go. "Sounds good."

By silent consensus, they end up leaning out of the window, elbows on the ledge. Jon smokes his second-to-last cigarette; Daisy just takes deep breaths of night air. The distant lights on the other side of the water could be Faslane, where they keep the nuclear deterrent. He regrets even thinking about it; he doesn't want nuclear launch codes in his head along with everything else. But nothing taps at the door inside his mind, and when he asks his next question, it's only human curiosity.

"This thing out there, that sent you," he says. "It's not one of the fears. Something else?"

"Something else," Daisy— says. "You'll get there. Part of you already has."

"But you can't just… I don't know, _tell_ me?" 

"It's not really about that," Daisy says. "It's more like... I don't know, making you into a space for it. Somewhere it can live. And besides, when has telling you things ever worked out well for anyone?"

"Fair point." Jon stares at the glowing cigarette tip in his fingers, and wonders if Bill Nighy has ever been in the kind of film where they have snipers, or grenades, or black masks at dawn. "Daisy… how close is the Hunt?"

"Close," Daisy says. 

Jon follows her pointing finger. For a moment he can't make sense of what he's looking at, and then he sees them, the figures between the trees. They're not the ghosts he heard on the shoreline, who were driven out in the Clearances, who were the hunted. These new spectres are solid, with twisted, angular bodies, as though even when they were human their flesh hung in the wrong places off their bones. 

"Those are the Hunt's outriders," Daisy says. "Come on."

She closes the shutters, puts an arm around Jon's shoulders and leads him away from the window. Jon can still hear the strain in her voice, the raw quality to her breathing. They take another minute and begin again. 

*

"This is ridiculous," the tape tells you, in a voice you barely recognise. "I'm turning into Jon." 

It's a woman's voice, friendly, gently mocking. You've heard it before on tape: arguing with you about how to pronounce calliope; telling you about worms and monsters and fire extinguishers; one last time, so scared, shouting defiance at the creature about to steal her life. 

"This is Sasha," you say out loud, trying to force the knowledge to stay in your mind. If you say it firmly enough, perhaps it will banish the false memories of the thing your senses still believe was Sasha James. It helps. Not much, but a little. Enough for you to press play again. 

"Ooh," says a male voice — Tim, it's Tim, but not as you've heard him since Prentiss. 

(That's a lie. It wasn't Prentiss who turned him so bitter and angry. Tim was still his old self after Prentiss, making jokes to the ECDC and teasing you about your alleged romance with Basira. It was your mistrust that soured him, your paranoia that pushed him away.)

(But that's not the whole truth either, Jon. You were not the only bad thing to ever happen to Tim Stoker, although it is true that you were many of them.) 

"Are we doing impressions of Jon again?" Tim's voice takes on a sing-song tone as he continues: "Spoooooky statements and ominous sighs?" 

"That begs so many questions," Sasha's voice — real Sasha's real voice — tells him. "No, we are not doing impressions of our boss. _We_ are not doing anything. _You_ are popping out to Tesco's to buy me a bar of Dairy Milk the size of my head, and _I_ am testing a theory."

"Anything you say." He sounds so fond. So happy. You feel almost guilty, knowing how much the Tim you work with now would hate for you to hear him this unguarded. But you must know what they said, what Sasha saw fit to record. Tim already hates you, it's not worth sacrificing knowledge just to give him his privacy. "Dairy Milk. Big as your head. And if I, a sensitive new-age man who can observe subtle once-a-month context clues without judgement, were to return with said chocolate _and_ a strawberries and cream frappuccino from everyone's favourite mermaid-worshiping capitalist hellscape?"

The Sasha on the tape laughs. Tired as you are, you feel your mouth curl up slightly in echo. The Sasha you remember rarely laughed, and never so infectiously as this, a joy you can almost hold in your hands. 

"I'd say you were the best coworker a girl could ask for."

"That's the kind of praise I live for," Tim says, and there's the sound of a door opening and shutting. 

"Right," Sasha says. "Okay. 12th February 2016, session two. Same twenty-five statements as in session one. As expected, statements 1-10 recorded perfectly on my laptop in session one; statements 11-15 recorded adequately with minor static; statements 16-20 recorded poorly but are intelligible; statements 21-25 did not record digitally.

"Statement 1: I always knew there was something creepy about my neighbour's tortoise. 

"Statement 2: I was running as fast as I could, but I could still hear it behind me."

Sasha's tape continues in this vein. Single sentences read from statements, none of them particularly interesting until statement 9, which is lost to static. Statement 10 plays just fine. 

"So that's the first ten statements. If I'm right, there's a good chance that at least one of 6-10 will not play back." The tape clicks off, then on again. "Statement 9 didn't record!" Have you ever heard her sound this excited? This interested? You wish you could remember, even if the answer is no. "Okay, okay. Let's try some more from statement 9." 

And the tape dissolves into static again. 

"I should really try the rest of the statements, but you know what? It's been a long day, I'm bleeding from the womb, and I've earned the right to do a Jon occasionally." A pause. "Jon, if and when you listen to these tapes, please know I mean that with the greatest respect. Well, a moderate amount of respect. Okay, not _no_ respect, shall we go with that?"

She hmms to herself. "I wonder if it can record summaries as long as I don't quote the text directly? And if so, how close can I push it to directly quoting it — a short summary, a long summary, just changing a few words here or there?"

The tape clicks off. On. You are leaning forward eagerly, willing her to continue this experiment, to discover everything about this strange new phenomenon. 

"Summary A of statement 9: It's about a boy who finds a flower."

Off. On.

"So that works. Summary B of statement 9: It's about a boy who finds a flower with high sentimental value. He finds the memory of the flower very comforting, and sometimes believes he can smell it in unlikely places."

Off. On.

"Okay. Summary C of statement 9: When he was young, the statement giver found a flower. He believes it was planted by his grandparents when they first came here as refugees, and has flowered every spring since. When he is scared or sad, he likes to imagine he can smell the flower, and he claims that sometimes he actually can. It has helped him cope with difficult situations."

Off. On. 

"Right. Summary D of statement 9." But instead of Sasha's voice, there's static. A few garbled words can be made out — _flower_ , _smell_ , _bankrupt_ , _hope_. 

The tape clicks off after about five minutes of static. You have listened intently to every hiss and pop, drinking down those few words you can just about hear. You are torn between the urge to go back, to try to listen again and make out more, and to go forward, to learn everything Sasha has learned. 

The tape clicks back on:

"Ah. Okay, so some level of summary is doable, but not a high level of detail. Great. Definitely more calibration to do, but those are some good benchmarks for now. Tim will be back in a minute, so—"

As if on cue, a door opens and closes. "I brought chocolate, I brought fraps, and, because I am the best colleague in the Institute, nay, the world, I broug—" But the tape clicks off before you can find out what else Tim brought Sasha. You feel distantly sad about this. 

And once more, the tape clicks back on:

" _Apparently_ looking into creepy books for Jon trumps actual research. Jon, if and when you listen to this, you're a monster and must be stopped. Martin already said he couldn't find anything on Ex Altiora; let the poor boy have this. 

"I'll write this up properly later, but in case I don't get round to it: 

"There's something weird about the statements that won't record on our laptops. They seem more 'real' somehow, whatever 'real' means. But as you should be able to tell from this tape, there are also statements that will record digitally but _won't_ record on tape.

"So far I've only found two. I'll store statement 9 — the one I tried to record here — with this tape. The other one is about a yew tree in a churchyard, I put that one back into the Archive without realising. More to follow."

There's nothing else on the tape, but, as promised, there is a statement with it. You read it eagerly. 

It's about a boy who finds a flower.  
  


"Okay, let me get this straight," Jon says. "Whatever this is, it's there in some of the statements. A very few of them. I've never found any of them myself."

Daisy gives him a small, sad smile. "I don't think you can. Not any more, anyway."

"But people bring them to me," Jon says, putting away whatever he might feel about that. "And then I can't read them, or they won't record to the Eye's tapes. Because... the Eye doesn't want them?"

Daisy smiles encouragingly. 

"Because they belong to something else," Jon says, making his way through it step by step. "What else?"

"You remember what Gerard Keay told you?" Daisy says. "About how there's only fear? No esoteric powers for, say, love, or hope, or things like that?"

"Gerry," Jon says automatically. "Yeah, so what?"

"So, he might have been wrong." Daisy shrugs, and says it in full for the first time. "Hope is the thing with feathers. He didn't really know about that."

"How could he have done?" Jon asks. "You know what happened to him."

"He had things other than fear," Daisy says. "He had you on his side, in the last few moments of his––existence, I guess you'd call it."

"Too little, too late."

"But not nothing," Daisy says. 

"Not nothing," Jon agrees, and then, "Oh, _shit_."

Daisy is already at the window ledge, gesturing over her shoulder for him to follow. The Hunt's outriders are gathered there just beyond the glass, their skeletal fingers curling and grasping, mouths gaping open and full of incisor teeth. They're in a ring around the house, Jon realises, in some grotesque parody of the yew tree ghosts at Lindisfarne. As he watches, one of them reaches out to Daisy from the other side of the glass, and taps. It's an obscenely clear, loud noise, and it even makes Martin stir. Jon looks back at him and then at the rank terror in Daisy's face, and feels something inside him shift and catch the light.

"Jon," Daisy says. "Jon, don't, you can't—"

Jon grabs a fire iron from by the empty hearth and opens the front door. The wind from the sea is rich with salt and pine, and he isn't afraid. He wasn't afraid of the ghosts on the shoreline; he wasn't afraid of Daisy in the dark. Whatever it is, the thing that's becoming part of him with each story Daisy tells, it glitters like the sun through water and flashes like the turn of a knife. 

There's a moment in which anything might happen. Then the outriders of the Hunt back off. They move away from where Jon is standing in the doorway, still holding the fire iron like it could do anything except look comedic against an army of spectres. 

"She has till dawn," Jon says, both to them and the universe at large. "Fuck off and _leave her alone_."

Then the reaction hits, the sheer stupidity of what he's just done and somehow survived doing. Jon slams the door and has to sit on the floor for a while, shaking, before he can do anything else.

"Well," Daisy says. It looks like she's straining every muscle in her body to not call him a fucking idiot. "That was... something."

"Yes," Jon says. They can't see the outriders from the window any more, only distant signs of movements down towards the loch. As they watch, even those dissipate, leaving only the still night and the sense Jon has of the thing with feathers, now growing stronger all the time. "It worked."

"I mean, yes," Daisy says. "But it did take up time. Which, as I keep telling you, we _don't have_."

Jon looks at his phone again. It's nearly five in the morning and soon there will be a change in the quality of the darkness. He waits until he stops shaking, grabs the hip flask and says, "Go on."

*

"This is a part of the story about you that you do not know," Daisy says. "This happened while you were dreaming, to a woman who had no fear.

"She comes to see you because she loved you once, and does still: enough to keep death from you, when the time is right. Other hospital rooms are full of chatter, of shouting, of machines incessantly bleeping. This one is not. If Georgie were afraid of anything, she might be afraid of this silence, this sense that you are the still point of a turning world. But she does not. She visits you, every week or couple of weeks, and stays a while; she reads, or plays on her phone, and talks to you when she has something to say. 

On a day in early spring, which is a beautiful one in London, with cherry trees growing even in the narrow curtilage of the hospital, she sits in the plastic chair and says, 'So, funny story. One of the nurses here asked me if you were the sort of person who listens to the radio, and if so, what station you listen to. The NHS Trust charity has got an Alexa or something and walks it up and down the wards playing it at people who might or might not be able to hear it. It's something they do for people even when they're unconscious, apparently. At some level, everyone responds to a human voice.

'Anyway, I said that when you and I lived together, you listened to the radio just as much as the next middle-class millennial, and you hate Radio 4 so let's make you listen to that. And then she asked me if I was a relative, and I explained that you really are kind of a Disney princess where your family are concerned, it's all early parental deaths and being brought up by aged grandmothers who are also dead. Look, Jon, you've been in the fucking coma a really long time, okay? I'm allowed to make jokes.

'So I told the nurse that it's complicated, but there aren't a lot of people in your life. And here’s the funny part: the very next day, I met someone who knew you. At least, I think I did? It's another thing that's complicated, I guess. What isn't.'

Georgie smiles, and takes your outstretched hand. 

'I've taken up volunteering in a community garden," she says. 'Yeah, I know, so wholesome, right. It's nice, though. Full of fruit and vegetables that get harvested when they're ready, and herbs which people can cut and use all year round. I go down there in the evenings when I don't have much else on, and get to know my neighbours, which I guess is the point. I just met my actual next-door neighbour, though. She hasn't been able to get out much the last few months but now the weather is improving she feels up to it. A couple of years ago she broke her leg right there in the garden, tripped over a stray garden fork and hit her head on a rock. It was late in the evening and the middle of the winter so there wasn't anyone else around and these days she sticks to the warmer months when half the street is out. She told me the whole story, and somehow I just _knew_ ––anyway. I asked her if she'd mind if I recorded what she said. I thought you'd like to hear it."

Georgie touches your hand again, and gets out her phone. The statement is from her neighbour, whose name is Elen Jones, concerning rosemary, rue, and something that happened in a garden.

_'Pwy bynnag ydoedd, siaradon nhw yn Gymraeg i mi. Eisteddon nhw ymhlith y rhosmari a'r gorddon ac roedd ganddyn nhw lais tyner, ond roedd fy llygaid ar gau ac ni welais i nhw o gwbl. Gofynon nhw cwestiynau, ac roedd rhaid i mi siarad, i aros yn effro: Roedd rhaid i mi eu hateb. Rydw i'n credu fod galwon nhw'r ambiwlans. Pan ddeffrais i, roedden nhw wedi mynd.'"_

For a few moments, there's silence. Daisy takes the hip flask from Jon before he drops it. "It's all right," she says, gently. 

"I mean, I do hate Radio 4," Jon says, to delay having to say the next thing, which is, "I don't know what that means."

"I do, a bit," Daisy says. "Why don't you, Archivist?"

He understands why he doesn't; he understands that Daisy's question is a test, to see if he's been paying attention all this time. But he's half-panicked anyway, because it turns out that the only thing more bodily disconcerting that having an eldritch power is having it taken away. 

"I'm not the Archivist, am I," Jon says. He hasn't been, now, for several hours; from about ten minutes after first Daisy started talking, then in fits and starts, and now, not at all. It feels like trying to think around a shard of glass inside his head. It doesn't hurt, but it will. 

"Not so much, anyway," Daisy says. "If we're making space for something, I guess there's a bit less space for what's already there." 

It would be nice, Jon thinks, if there could be an eldritch unholy war that _didn't_ claim his body as a battlefield. He knows Daisy understands that without him having to say it. "It won't last."

"No, it won't," Daisy says. "Do you think someone else is the Archivist, just for tonight? Does someone always have to be?"

"I don't think so," Jon says. "Elias didn't give me the job the same day Gertrude died. There can be spaces in between. What does it mean?"

"It means there was an accident," Daisy says. "It means it was dark and quiet, and Georgie's neighbour thought at first that no one heard, and no one was going to find her. But someone passing on the street knew she had fallen. Whoever they were, they came to sit with her, and they understood that if she lost consciousness, she might not come back. So they asked her questions, in her own language that she hadn't spoken since she was a child. They asked her about herself, about her family, about how she grew up. She had to answer, she told Georgie; she felt she didn't have a choice but to answer. Which meant she had to stay awake, and she was awake when the ambulance came, and it was so cold and dark in that place, but someone was with her, and she wasn't afraid."

"Let me guess," Jon says. "She never saw them again, whoever they were, except in her dreams."

"Georgie didn't say, at least not when she was telling you about it," Daisy says. "Perhaps she didn't know."

"And you only know what she knows?" Jon asks, but it's only out of habit; he doesn't need an answer. He leans back on the base of the sofa and closes his eyes. "I don't know if Gertrude had the same thing, you know. I don't know if she understood everything anyone said to her. But she did speak Welsh, I think."

Because she was a human being, too, despite everything. Because Jon is, too, lying on the floor here in this strange, halfway there place, waiting for a dawn that will take his friend from him. Inevitably, he thinks of Martin, his own still point in a turning world. 

"It might not have been Gertrude," Daisy says. "It might have been you. Georgie thought it was you." 

"Does it matter?" Jon asks, with a sudden rush of bitterness. He's still chilled to the bone, he hasn't slept for more than twenty-four hours and for the first time in months he's human enough to feel it. "If I called an ambulance for someone once and forgot about it later? Does it _matter_?" 

"It mattered to her," Daisy says softly. "It matters to me, that you went out and swore at the Hunt, like an idiot. Small things matter." 

*

There's a box in one corner of your office. It's been there since you got back. Since you woke up. Since you made yet another choice in that long series you list sometimes, late at night, trying to work out where you could have done something differently, where you could have been someone different, and not ended up here. 

There's a box. You don't know who cleared Tim's desk out at some point in those long six months, but whoever it was, they put some of his effects in a small box in the corner of your office and left it for you, or for your successor. 

It's late. You're tired. Your heart hurts. You open the box.  
  


"Daisy, please," Jon says. "I don't think I can take this."

He may not have to, he thinks dizzily. When the dawn breaks over the ridge, it will flood this room all at once, bring into sharp relief the awful blank walls, the threadbare sofa cushions and the discarded fire iron. Jon can feel its coming presence like a shadow falling across a door. Martin stirs for a moment on the sofa, murmuring something about the water's edge, the Lonely. Jon reaches up by reflex to entwine their fingers, then looks back at Daisy.

Daisy sips her last cup of tea, adds a slug of whisky to it, passes him the hip flask again. "You can take this, and you will," she says.  
  


Lying on top is an envelope with one of Tim's novelty Garfield post-it notes on. He's written in that too-familiar scrawl, _Jon — I still don't like you and I still don't trust you —_ The words have been underlined heavily. _— but you gave me Sasha's tape. So. If I'm dead you can have this. — Tim. PS Fuck you._

You want to stop. Sit down. Cry, maybe, if you still can. You wish Martin were there — or, rather, your wish goes from background ache, from constant, dull longing, to a sharper, more immediate pain. But you don't stop and you don't sit down and it has been a long, long time since you were able to cry. Instead you open the envelope. 

Inside: a card with watercolour wildflowers on the front, soft blues and purples against a blurry green background. And inside the card is a handwritten letter on creamy notepaper, and a message written in the card itself: 

_5th October 2013_

_Dear Timmy,_

_Congratulations on your new job! Your father sent us an article in the Guardian about the Magnus Institute; it all sounds very grand! Your grandfather would be so proud._

_Sylvia had one of her good days yesterday. I read her the article and she smiled the whole day; it was her idea to send you this:— your first 'statement'!_

_All my love,_  
_Granny_

No tape recorders switch on. If you were paying attention, that would have been your first clue. Your second, maybe, if you count the fact that Tim left this for you at all. 

But you're tired and you're grieving and in front of you is new knowledge, secret knowledge, so the first clue you actually notice is when you open your mouth to read the handwritten letter and you find that you can't. 

"Oh," you say out loud to the empty room. "It's one of those. Thank you, Tim." You can't tell if you're being sarcastic or sincere. Mostly, you're just sad. 

Right, you tell yourself, you can't read these out loud. The Eye doesn't want them. Not a problem. But then, with the slow creeping horror of a nightmare, you realise you can't read this one at all. 

You, who can read every language ever written, who these days only has to touch a statement to know the shape of it, cannot read these words. Your eyes skitter away from them. You cannot focus. You know the words are there, but they're out of your reach. 

Quickly, you reach for one of the stacks of statements on your desk. You read them hungrily, desperately, gulping down the knowledge paragraph by paragraph without stopping to chew. The worst things that have ever happened to seven people — whose names you know but do not care enough about now to recall — swallowed down in a handful of panicked minutes, just to reassure yourself that you can still read. 

You do not add this to the list of choices you have made. Perhaps you are right not to. It wasn't a turning point, just another step on a long, straight road. 

The tape recorders turned on eagerly when you grabbed the statements, but as it becomes apparent you won't be reading anything out loud, they they are switching off again, one by one, disappearing back to wherever it is they go when you aren't entertaining them. By the time you have finished reading, there are only a handful left in the office, none of them running. 

You pick up the statement again. The one from Tim. The one that you still can't read. The writing isn't blurry or illegible, you can make out individual letters, but when you try to put them together into words, all you see is nothing. 

You wonder briefly if Tim knew this would happen. A post-mortem fuck you to the man — the monster — who got him killed. But it doesn't matter. What matters is that maybe someone else can read this to you? Or give you a summary, at least, if whatever is so very wrong with you stops you hearing it directly. 

You are halfway to Martin's office when you realise your mistake. 

You promised him. You promised to trust him, to let him do what he needs to do. You can't break that promise over this. 

I'm the next most obvious choice. More obvious, perhaps, if it weren't so late and you weren't missing Tim and Sasha so painfully. But you know — _know_ — I'm asleep and—  
  


"Oh, Jon," Daisy interrupts herself. "That really is very sweet."

"What is?" Jon asks. 

Daisy glances out of the window. "Not important. I'll tell you later, if there is a later." 

Her tone shifts:  
  


Just as you know I'm asleep, you know Basira is awake. She's sitting by my bed, re-reading Buried statements and taking careful notes. 

You approach her cautiously. She is your ally, but not your friend. 

"I need help," you tell her, speaking quietly so as not to wake me. It's not the best choice of words, and she has a knife out before you can explain about Tim and the statement you can't read. 

She doesn't put the knife down after you've explained, but she takes the letter from you. 

"So I just read it out loud?" she checks. She's speaking quietly too, your hushed conversation taking place less than an arm's span from my head. It doesn't occur to either of you to move this elsewhere. "And you find out if you can hear it?"

"That's the idea," you say. "If it's what I think it is, it shouldn't be unpleasant for you." 

She hmms. "No creepy recorders?" 

"No creepy recorders. They don't seem to like these, for some reason."

"You should have led with that," she says. "Anything those things don't like is fine by me."

> Dear Timmy,
> 
> Don't tell your father about this! He never liked us talking about it, and made me promise not to tell you or Danny. I think you're old enough to know now; and if you get me in trouble with your father, well, it wouldn't be the first time. (Sylvia says it's a family tradition at this point!) He still scolds me something rotten for all those times I used to let you 'run away' to hide in our shed. 
> 
> I didn't enjoy boarding school. I was a scholarship girl with a stammer and a limp; I missed my family and I hated my peers. The first time I met Sylvia, I hated her, too. She was in the year above, with long dark hair and a smile that took my breath away, and I'd never met anyone who made me so angry just by existing. Perfect Sylvia with her perfect skin and her perfect posture and her perfect voice and her perfect hands. 
> 
> (Sylvia says she liked me from the first moment she saw me scowling at her! I don't believe her for a moment, but it's kind of her to lie to an old lady.) 
> 
> I hated her, but even I had to admit that she never let the other girls make fun of my stutter. If she heard them mocking me, she would draw herself up and give them Such A Look as you never did see. Over time, I began to notice how kind she was, how often she would defend us younger girls, how gentle she was with the stray cats the mistresses pretended not to know we all fed. 
> 
> I still resented her; I wasn't some stray cat to be pitied! But just like any stray cat, with time and patience I was tamed, and by the end of my first year I had such a pash for her I thought I might die. 
> 
> (Sylvia says I should tell you what a pash is. She says you may be unfamiliar with 1930s girls boarding school slang. I say you're old enough and ugly enough to work it out for yourself. I'm sure your 'internet' will help if you're as innocent to the ways of the world as your father seems to think you are!)
> 
> I spent my second year doing nothing to shed that stray cat comparison. I brought her wild flowers and treats from the tuck shop; if I could have brought her the moon on a stick, you can bet your bottom I would have! 
> 
> We became friends, and then we became best friends, and then the war came, and I was evacuated to a small village in County Durham and I didn't see her again for several years. 
> 
> That village is where I met your grandfather. You know this part of the story, I'm sure. How handsome he was, how kind he was to all the evacuees. We were all half in love with him, and we all wept when he went off to fight. He came back without the use of one hand and with a limp to match mine. We were married that spring. 
> 
> Sylvia came to the wedding! It was the first time I'd seen her since school, though we had written each other so many long letters over the years it was as if we'd never been apart. 
> 
> Watching your grandfather fall instantly in love with her, well, it was enough to make me fall in love with him all over again. 
> 
> (Sylvia is sleeping again now, but I know she'll want me to assure you that there was never even a thought of him leaving me for her. You're a child of the modern age, so perhaps you understand, or perhaps, like your father before you, you think your generation invented free love. But for Sylvia's sake, please rest assured that this is a story about love and magic, not betrayal.) 
> 
> Perhaps if we'd been better off, able to move away, we could have taken her with us? We talked about it, your grandfather and Sylvia and me; about moving far enough away we could pretend she was his tragically widowed sister, living with us out of the goodness of our hearts. But Sylvia wanted her own life and her own family, and we wanted that for her too, and it was all silliness anyway:— we could no more move away from your grandfather's family and their farm than we could fly to the moon. 
> 
> She married a terrible man. Quite, quite awful. The least said about him the better. Her letters got shorter and farther between; we wanted to think it was because she was happy without us, but we knew it wasn't. 
> 
> She had your Uncle Peter and your Auntie Joan, the only two blessings to come out of that whole wretched ordeal. I only held Peter once as a baby, and I didn't get to meet Joanie until she was nearly four years old, but the moment I set eyes on of each them I knew I would protect them with my life. It was a love as true and strong as that I felt for your own father and your Uncle Quentin when they were born. We kept the photos of all four children together, proudly displayed on the same cabinet. 
> 
> We both missed Sylvia so desperately, but you mustn't think we were unhappy! Your grandfather and I loved each other very much, and we loved our life together. I have so many happy memories of that time:— watching your grandfather play cricket on the village green; learning, at the grand old age of twenty-three, how to ride a bike; parlour games and laughter and, of course, raising our own two rambunctious boys. 
> 
> We lasted seven years apart. Every 18th July, Sylvia's birthday, your grandfather would pick me wildflowers and hold me tight. Every 9th October, the day before our wedding anniversary, the day your grandfather first met Sylvia, I would put her favourite song on our record player and coax him into a dance. You know the one:— The Girl In The Little Green Hat. You and Danny got her the CD when we finally had to concede that battle to the digital age. 
> 
> (Sylvia has woken up. She says I must get to the point! She says you don't have time for an old woman's ramblings. I say you'll make time if you know what's good for you, young Timothy. She says not to tease you. I say she always has been a better person than me!) 
> 
> One day — not an 18th July or a 9th October, just a spring day, full of gentle warmth and the promise of summer — we were talking about her, and how much we wished and hoped and prayed she would survive her marriage with her heart intact, and I would swear that for a moment, the world felt electric. It wasn't a bad feeling, nor a scary one, just vast and full of potential. 
> 
> It was as if the air around us was alive, as if every action and every breath had the potential to change the world. There was a newness to everything. As if each mote of dust were a seed, just waiting to grow into something beautiful, something better than what had been before. 
> 
> We held hands and I knew that whatever I said next would have power. I knew it would mean something. So what else could I say? I remember it so clearly:— 'I hope he dies. I hope he dies and she comes back to us.'
> 
> And the next day, he did. Something wrong with his heart. So sad. 
> 
> A terrible tragedy, of course, for Sylvia to be widowed so young with two small children to take care of. Just terrible. How fortunate, then, that she had such dear friends as us to take her in. Your grandfather's farm was doing well by then, and Sylvia was always a hard worker, perfect for the demands of village life. She was the reason we started keeping pigs, did you know? She'd thought about our farm a lot while we were apart, and had read up on all sorts of modern agricultural theories. 
> 
> (Sylvia says to tell you that a small number of pigs can introduce huge efficiencies to almost any farming set up, as they will eat whatever waste you produce, and their own manure is a high quality fertiliser. I have reminded Sylvia that you live in London and research ghosts, but she is quite insistent. As a kindness to you, I will not also remind her that when your mother explained to you where bacon comes from, you cried for nearly an hour and refused to eat anything at all for lunch.) 
> 
> The three of us raised our four children on that farm as siblings. We can't regret the time apart that brought us Peter and Joanie, but I'm still bitterly jealous of every moment that man had with her that we didn't. I have no doubt my words did for him, and I believe it's one of the best things I ever did. I would have danced at his funeral if your grandfather hadn't stopped me. We did dance later, all three of us, giddy and happy and free, listening to Sylvia's favourite song and all three of us wearing wildflowers in our hair. 
> 
> How's that for a statement, Timmy? I hope it has made you smile. It's an odd thing, but I hope you're proud of us, too. And I hope one day you find love like we have, whether with one person, or two, or ten. And I hope your new job brings magic into your life in the best possible way. 
> 
> With all my love,  
>  Granny
> 
> PS Sylvia says if you find love with ten people, you must make sure to bring them all to visit us, and we will scandalise your father together! 

  
Basira puts the letter down.

"Wow," she says. "Tim and his polyamorous murder grandparents. Do you think Sylvia killed him?"

You shrug. "Either way, no great loss."

Basira reaches down carefully to put her hand on the cot next to mine. She doesn't touch me — I'm still asleep — but you think she gets something from the closeness anyway. You put your own hand against the wall and hope that one floor up and two rooms along, Martin knows that you trust him.  
  


Jon lifts Martin's hand and presses a kiss to his knuckles. He knows now.

"One more," Daisy says. 

*

The Archers is on at seven. This was back at the end of last year, when Pip Archer had her baby and Freddie got sent to the young offenders' institution. You hate all of it, but especially the women who always sound tired and the cows that moo to remind you they're there. It's boring and pointless. You spend five minutes after the episode ends explaining this to me and I tell you that that isn't true at all, at one point The Archers was an important part of the BBC's public service broadcasting; it conveyed information from the Ministry of Agriculture about modern farming methods. You ask in that case why does there have to be so much shagging, sheep- or otherwise, and I remind you you're a dickhead. We order a pizza and eat it with the radio still on, the evening slipping away around us into a cold, clear night. A couple of days ago Basira pointed out that we might be sleeping on camp beds and hiding out like rats in the corners of the Archive, but we're still grown adults and Londoners. Deliveroo and IKEA and Ocado can deliver here just as well as they can anywhere else. 

You wash up and put the recycling out. When you come back you're twitchy, lying on your bed barefoot and not reading the book in your hand. 'Do something else,' I tell you, from where I'm sitting on the other side of the room. You have seen me do this a lot just lately. Sitting; cultivating stillness. You envy it.

"I don't know what," you say, trying to shake off the restlessness. It doesn't work, and the movement of your head nearly dislodges the fairy lights that are tacked up on the wall behind. They're nothing to do with you, really; they were just in the IKEA order, the one that had enough plates and cutlery for us all to eat off, now we're all sharing what was originally a small workplace kitchen. The fairy lights aren't for Basira, either, who's always away now and keeps her camp bed deep in the stacks even when she is here. Martin would like them, but he's not here either. I might be a little softer, a little sweeter, since I came out from under the earth, but I was a vessel of the Hunt for decades, and Melanie's also calmer these days, but seriously. 

Maybe the fairy lights _are_ for you, then. You reach up to the string, let the twisted wires run through your fingers, then drop them. Restless.

"Have a drink," I say. You're getting on my nerves. "Organise the kitchen cupboards. Paint your nails."

You hug your knees, looking down at your bare feet. "I used to," you say, retrieving a memory with difficulty. "All the time. I haven't much, the last couple of years."

"I remember noticing," I say, and neither of us mentions the best opportunity I had to notice, when I was gagging you and binding your hands. "Why'd you do it?"

"I liked it. Living my truth or some such bullshit." You lean back against the sole pillow. "Then all the murder and kidnapping and death and whatnot sort of got me out the habit."

"I was a proper goth when I was a teenager," I say. "I used to do patterns on mine. Little sparkly eyes. I could—"

"Daisy, please, I have _some_ dignity left."

"Then that just leaves the drink." I fetch a couple of bottles of cider, take the caps off with my teeth and toss you one. "I've got something else for you, too. Keep meaning to give it to you. Maybe this is the time."

"A statement?" You're interested, of course, and then confused: there's no tape recorder within reach. You look around you and can't spot one at all. I watch, as the understanding dawns on your face. "It's one of _those_ statements, isn't it."

It's not a question, so I'm not compelled to answer, but I want to. You look different for a moment, less haunted and more human, and I don't want to meet that with silence. "I think so," I say. "Basira gave it to me to read, when I came back from the Buried. She thought I'd like it. She said I should give it to you in due course."

She didn't say what _in due course_ meant, and I've been wondering that myself. But something you said reminded me of it, and this quiet night feels like the right time. I get the paper statement out from under the bed, keeping it out of your line of sight; Basira told me you wouldn't be able to read it and I think it might upset you to see the text. I prop it on my knees and begin.

> Statement of Alice Buchanan, concerning an assortment of pocket-sized items. Original statement given 15 June 1943. Statement begins.
> 
> I'd hoped I might be able to speak to someone, rather than writing this down? If writing it down is what it has to be, then I suppose there's something you should know about me upfront. My name really is Alice Buchanan, but I'm a man. For my first twenty-five years of being alive, my mother called me Ally and everyone else called me Wee Alastair, which was fine. Then I was conscripted. My first week with my unit, a bunch of enlisted comedians saw the Christian name on my papers and the rest is history. I really don't mind it, you know. The men used it out of affection more than anything else, and I got so used to it I stuck with it in civilian life. You're probably wondering if I have the sort of criminal tendencies one might expect of a man called Alice. Yes, I do. Not that I get much opportunity to indulge them up in Montrose, but when I have the chance I come down to London to frequent a certain kind of establishment - I'm sure I don't need to insult your intelligence by telling you exactly what kind - and quite honestly it saves time. No need for secret handshakes and yearning looks when you can go up to other men and say your name is _Alice_. That's not actually what this story is about. I just wanted to put your mind at rest on the point.
> 
> The other thing you ought to know about me is that I'm dead. To be clear, I _don’t_ have the sort of tendencies you'd expect from a man who's dead. I don't make woo-woo noises and walk through walls. I eat pies and drink whisky and when another bloody cow kicks me in the leg I shout a lot and damn its eyes. In the spring of 1942, while I was somewhere near El-Alamein getting kicked in the leg by camels instead, my parents got a telegram, and a little while after that they got a package. You know the sort. Six feet long, rectangular, with handles. So they had a very nice funeral, I'm told, with wreaths and weeping, and a rousing chorus of "Those In Peril on the Sea", this apparently being the best they could do for Wee Alastair lately of this parish (who had, lest we forget, passed on to his holy repose in the _desert_ ). The battalion I was attached to was doing some terribly hush-hush work involving piles of sand and ammunition dumps, and there was a bit of blackout on letters for a while. Then, after one or two battles you may have heard of, I was demobbed on account of a bit of shrapnel in the shoulder. I thought I'd sneak up on the train and surprise the folks at home. My poor mother fainted dead away in the shrubbery. 
> 
> So that was all very confusing for a while, and several months later I still have to live off the largesse of my dearest mater and pater, given that I can't get the jolly old Clydesdale to give me a chequebook. The War Office won't give me a pension, either, at least not yet. Apparently they have their best men working on it, and all I can say about that is if it was their best men who sent the telegram to start with, then no wonder. No one is really sure how it happened. But it's not as though I have the least common name in Scotland, and no doubt two men's records were swapped over somewhere and by the time anyone realised, it was too late. It may not surprise you to learn that the War Graves Commission have also proven less than helpful. They seem to take the view that there is a grave, in Montrose, and there is a man in it whose name was probably Alastair Buchanan, so what's the problem?
> 
> The problem, I keep telling them, is the other set of parents, of Alastair-not-Alice, who don't know what happened to their boy. You don't get a memorial for the missing. All you know is that the battle ended, and he never came home.
> 
> Yes, Alice, I hear you say, this is all very interesting, I'm sure, but why write it all down in a fusty anteroom at the Magnus Institute when you could be in the Leopard on Fitzroy Street making eyes at the the barman? What a good question. It's because… well, I spend a lot of time looking up cows' arses. Maybe I should have said that to begin with, too. I wasn't an officer because I was _competent_ , it was just one of those professional things. I followed a battalion around doctoring to their horses and camels and pet mice and whatnot, and now I'm a country vet again, spending all my time worrying about colic and laminitis and galloping hangnails. I have my old raincoat to get mucky in, with good deep pockets, and at any given moment I'm usually carrying around a hoof pick, two thermometers, sugar lumps in foil packets, gauze for bandages, painkillers for my own little nick in the shoulder - all the sort of thing you'd expect. Which is why I was surprised, a month or two after I'd come home and gone back to work, when I turned out my pockets looking for a stethoscope and got a packet of spiced coffee and a little book of pressed flowers instead. The farmer looked at me like I was off my nut, and I wasn't entirely convinced that I wasn't. I muttered something about having got someone's else's coat, fetched the spare stethoscope out of my vet's bag, and went back to inspecting Lucy the derby hopeful for an intestinal torsion. When that was done, I took the packet and the pressed flowers home. I did wonder where on earth I'd got them, but time slipped on, as it does. I wouldn't have thought about it again if I hadn't reached into my pocket for a shilling at the summer fete a few weeks later and found an engraved fountain pen and a cloakroom ticket for the Dorchester.
> 
> Someone else's pocket, I said again. Of course it wasn't. Even I can't lose my trousers by mistake at eleven o'clock in the morning at a summer fete in Montrose. The old lady at the tombola stall gave me an even odder look than the farmer had, and I scurried off wondering if I'd come unglued somehow in the war. The name engraved on the pen was Alastair Buchanan, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you that I'd never seen it before in my life. When I got home I looked for the book of pressed flowers and the packet of coffee, half expecting them to have vanished into thin air. But they were on my desk where I'd left them, so I added the pen and the ticket and waited to see what happened next.
> 
> It turned out that was only the start of it. In the eight months since I've been home and Alastair-not-Alice has been in the ground, I've found all manner of things in my pockets. A penknife, a handful of pretty seashells, cigarettes of a brand I don't smoke. Bright buttons, sealing wax, string. Once, a bottle of red nail lacquer. Not something I like, myself, but it makes me glad to think Alastair-not-Alice was like me in more than name. 
> 
> And, of course, lots and lots of that spiced coffee. I thought at first it was just the gritty army kind, but it wasn't; it's one of those aromatic ginger-cardamom blends I remember the Bedouin used to favour, and I suppose Alastair-not-Alice had exactly the same opportunity to get a taste for it that I did. The first time I actually brewed it I thought at first that perhaps I'd made a terrible mistake, that some awful skeleton would emerge from the churchyard and drag me off to the infernal depths. But nothing of that sort happened. I brewed the coffee and drank it and felt a little calmer, a little more able to cope with life back in the north, where I'm still not quite sure which way is up most days. I get so much of it in my pockets that I can have a cup of it most evenings, if I'm careful. Now the days are longer I've taken to drinking it outside, by the churchyard wall, so Alastair-not-Alice can get the scent of it if he's of a mind. One day, I'll get the War Office to see some damn sense. In the meantime, I count my blessings, even when the cows go for me and the shoulder wound aches. The evenings up here are so long and lovely, and say what you like, at least I'm not in the ground. 

  
You sit still for a long time after that. "I understand why Basira gave that one to you," you say, after a while.

"Alice, who wasn't in the ground," I say. "Yeah. It was a nice story and it made her think of me. It was just… nice."

I feel stupid and incoherent. I'm not an archival assistant or a researcher; it isn't my job to read these things, or bring them to you. But you seem calmer, curled up under your stupid fairy lights, and you thank me as though you mean it. I put the statement away under the bed and turn the radio on for the Shipping Forecast. We both sleep better that night than we have in some time, but I'm still worried. I was supposed to do this for you then."  
  


It takes Jon a moment to understand what she means by that. "This thing that we're doing now," he says. "All the statements, the whole story. You were supposed to do it then?"

"I was going to," Daisy says. She has the harshness in her voice of the oncoming Hunt, but he can make out plain old misery, too, and regret. "I didn't."

"Why not?" Jon asks, remembering he doesn't have to be careful; she only needs to answer if she wants to.

Daisy gets up for a moment and stretches. "I wanted my own story, I suppose," she says. "My own little discovery in the Archive, the statement that didn't make _me_ feel like shit. Melanie and Basira and Sasha each had one. Martin had loads, damn him. Tim didn't even need the Archive. He had his very own story and so did Georgie. I was just… the messenger, I guess. But I thought I'd hold out. Wait and see if I had one to tack on the end for you."

"And did you?" Jon asks, but he knows the answer. Around them, the night is one cut from bleeding into morning. Whatever great change she hoped would be wrought in him, it's a minute or two from completion. 

Daisy gives him a small smile. "I was a hunter, a monster. You know what we do, to things with feathers? Rip them out."

"I'm the avatar of the Eye," Jon says, patiently, "and this seems to be happening to _me_. For some reason. Unless I've got it all wrong and this is actually some great gift from the universe for Martin. Which, ah, would make more sense, now I come to think of it."

"Points for humility, but it _is_ you," Daisy says. "No, I figured it out. Why I didn't find something in the Archive of my own. I didn't have to."

"I don't understand."

"Don't you?" Daisy rolls her eyes at him. "Statement of Alice "Daisy" Tonner, concerning Jonathan Sims, a fucking eejit. He hauled me out of the Buried, he brought me back to Basira. We drank too much, we talked about nothing, we worked on not becoming monsters. Sometimes I would wake up in a panic in the dark and hear his voice in the next room, and I'd be able to go back to sleep. You saved me. I'm trying to save you. _Statement ends_."

The dawn breaks over the ridge. It happens in a single transition, light uncurling in darkness like ink spilled into water. Jon is on his feet, aware in his heart’s blood of Martin behind him, still asleep and wholly defenceless. He meets Daisy’s eyes with every muscle in his body tensed to run.

“It’s all right,” Daisy says, sounding exhausted and weak, but still just about herself. “They’re not coming inside. I have to go to them.”

She points over her shoulder as she says it, indicating the rough path down to the loch. There are no visible spectres of the Hunt, but it’s only that the sunlight passes through them. They won’t leave until they get what they came for.

“I’m coming with you,” Jon says. 

“Jon…”

“They don’t want me,” Jon says impatiently. "And they can't have me, anyway."

He's figured out that much by now; this night of hope and feathers has made him into something the fears can't claim, at least for a little while. Daisy smiles at him and moves to the door. “Fine. Get your coat.”

Jon obeys, with a pause to brush his fingertips across Martin’s cheek. He doesn’t need to say anything; he’s coming back. Outside it’s bitterly cold, frost visible on the tips of leaves and pine needles. Jon and Daisy pick their way through the trees, the path only just wide enough for both of them. The wildflowers that line their way flutter in the breeze. 

Halfway down, there’s a graveyard. There are a lot of places like this along this shoreline, where the Clearances took the people and the sea took the land they left behind. The ruins of an old church and the few buildings that surrounded it are sinking back into the bracken and dune grass on the machair, but some of the stones of the burial ground have held fast. It reminds Jon of the churchyard at Lindisfarne. Daisy pauses as they go past and peers at the nearest headstone, cloaked with moss but with a few lines of engraved text still visible.

"Can you read this?" she asks.

Jon touches the worn stone, letting it chill his fingers. For a moment or two, he can see that the words aren't in English. _Gus am bris an latha; agus an teich na sgailean._ But there's a sense in which an epitaph is a statement given to the whole world. "Until the day's breaking," he says. “Until the shadows flee away.” 

"Sounds about right," Daisy says. "You'll be the Archivist again soon."

“Yeah.” Jon assesses the inside of his head, ringing with the Song of Songs in a language he does not speak. "Yeah, I know."

They go on towards the loch. It smells of pine and salt, of the promise of something new. At the water’s edge, Jon can see the ghosts gathering in the distant fog, translucent and menacing. Daisy glances at him, the quick, efficient look of the hunter. “You’d better not come any further,” she says.

"Daisy," Jon says, resentful that grief can still be all-consuming, like a fresh blade between his collarbones, as though this were a first or only loss. "I just… you know. I'm sorry about all this."

"Me, too." She reaches into her pocket and hands him her phone. "Here's the recording, for when you need it. I took the pass code off."

Jon had forgotten she'd recorded it all. He puts the phone in his own pocket and tries not to think about why she doesn't need it any more. "This is it, then?" he says.

Daisy gives him another appraising look. She's standing just where she was when she stepped out into his line of sight the night before. The daylight picks out the starkness in her face, how close she is to becoming something other than human. Jon thinks she'll move off without another word, but instead she leans in and kisses him on the cheek. 

"Remember this," she says, a whisper he wouldn't have heard without that momentary closeness. "And thank you."

"What for?" Jon tries to ask, but that's it. She holds his gaze a second longer, then turns away from him, trudging slowly along the sludgy mud. As she gets further away, the spectres emerge from the trees, more dangerous in daylight now they're less distinguishable from shadows. They're beckoning her forwards, carrying bayonets and claymores that glitter at the edges. Belatedly, it occurs to Jon that he should run. Daisy knows him, how he'll move and how he'll react. When his luck runs out, the Hunt can run him casually to the ground and pick his bones at its leisure. He should run. 

But before he can, something happens that he can't quite apply his mind to, that means he was somewhere and now he's somewhere else. He doesn't understand it. He thinks through the haze that it might be Daisy's last gift to him, or something else from the thing with feathers. Martin is saying, "Jon, wake up. We both fell asleep here, I don't know why. Jon, can you wake up just for a minute, please."

"No," Jon says. Being conscious is too much; being sprawled and dehydrated on a hard floor is too much; he wants to stay here with his eyes closed and his mind still by the water's edge, watching Daisy walk away from him.

"All right, I'm taking you to bed," Martin says, resignedly. Jon tries to muster a response, but the words don't seem to come out the way he wants them to. Martin is getting him up, somehow, then manhandling him under blankets and putting a pillow under his head. Jon sleeps lightly for a while, marginally conscious of Martin moving around him, of the room getting brighter as the day settles in. Some time passes; he's not sure how much.

"Jon," Martin says, again. He's sitting on the edge of the bed, absently stroking Jon's hair. "Stay here all day if you want to, but I'm going out for a walk. There's some milk and bread in the kitchen for breakfast."

He sounds loving, fond. Jon tries to speak and can't, reaching out with his eyes still half-closed. Martin saves him the trouble, taking his hand and gripping it. 

"Speaking of breakfast," he says, more awkwardly. "The statements Basira sent are on the table. She wasn't sure which ones you'd read already, so she just sent a bunch. They're there for you when you want them. All right, I'll see you in a while."

He kisses the top of Jon's head, then he's gone. The light in the room is steady. More time passes. 

Eventually, he has to get up. Jon drinks the glass of water Martin left for him and wanders blearily into the kitchen. The house is quiet and deserted; Jon wonders for a moment where Martin is, then remembers vaguely that he's gone out for a walk. He retrieves his phone to check the time, then realises it's not his phone, it's Daisy's. The weight of the thing in his hand is what brings it all back: the night, the statements, the ghosts out in the dark. 

And the thing with feathers. Instinctively, Jon moves to the window and looks out at the view. It's just as it was at dawn, when he and Daisy set out along the path through the wildflowers to the loch. He can still feel the presence in the landscape around him and knows it protected him, that it got him home safely and kept Daisy with him until the very end. It's a fragile, devastating thought, that has taken up a small space in his mind and consecrated it, but he doesn't think there's anything he can actually _do_ about it right now. 

Breakfast, then. He makes tea, rejects the bread for having the texture of tarpaulin, and decides reluctantly that he probably ought to read one of the statements that Basira sent, now that Martin is out and won't have to listen to him monologue. The one on the top of the pile will do as well as any other. It's about a fire in a childhood home. 

Wrapping his hands around the tea, he feels another memory slot into place, the knowledge making itself at home in that fragile space still he doesn't know what to do with. 

He'd been reviewing the tapes recorded during one of many kidnappings. Jan Kilbride floating in the vastness of space. Adonis Biros performing for hollow masks. Tim's brother. Melanie's father. All of them trapped in the amber of the tapes for him to explore at his leisure. 

The memory hitting him all at once in this empty cabin is framed by circuses and rituals and unknowings and wax and pain, Gertrude's plans and Elias's machinations and everything he couldn't do to protect anyone at all. But along with all that, what Jon remembers now in full technicolour detail is a stray, distracted thought about office gossip. Being at least nominally in charge, he remembers telling himself it was only fair he should be the subject of it on occasion. It was Martin he felt for, really. Obviously, _obviously_ Martin didn't "have it bad" for him, but if he did, it wouldn't be kind to joke about it. Jon could take whatever Melanie and Basira wanted to say about him, but he'd rather they spared Martin that. 

There's no Daisy for Jon to scowl at across the kitchen table — and never will be again — but he scowls anyway at a past self who made everything even harder than it needed to be. 

He remembers reviewing Tim's statement for the third time, checking back against previous statements where the Circus of The Other had featured. 

Then Martin entered with two cups of tea and his laptop. Back then he'd worked in Jon's office sometimes. It didn't bother Jon. 

Jon sips his tea in time with past self, remembers admitting to himself that he was aware of his own fondness for Martin, though back then he believed that he had no time and no wish to do anything about it. Now he has Martin, he can try not to be too angry at this younger Jon, who did nothing and said nothing about Martin's kindness, about his flashes of impatience, about his many thoughts and feelings on the importance of spiders to a viable ecosystem.

That was why the gossip had got to him. He had been aware that when Martin started working with him, he may have had a bit of a thing for Jon, though Jon was — and still, even now, is — at a loss as to why. But this younger Jon, with slightly fewer scars and slightly more humanity, had firmly believed that time was over. Just as no plan survives contact with the enemy, no 'thing' for Jon survived—

Yes. Well. It turns out that Martin does survive contact with the enemy. Martin's heart has, against all the odds, survived contact with Jon. Martin endures. 

When he looked up from his tapes again, he'd finished his tea and Martin had left. He'd put a statement on Jon's desk, with a post-it on top reading, _Not important, just nice — Martin,_ as if anyone else in this building would leave such a message. 

The statement was from the nineties, about a school the statement giver attended in the sixties. "It was not a good place," the statement giver wrote, before elaborating on the abuse and neglect they experienced there. Jon remembers wondering if Martin had misfiled it or somehow got confused. Perhaps there was a statement somewhere about rainbows and candy floss that had been accidentally put in a folder marked _Childhood trauma_.

He remembers a rolling cast of awful adults and scared, hurt children and different hiding places around the school and its grounds. He remembers at one point being glad to put it down and get back to creepy circuses.

But the statement continued — read silently in fits and starts over a couple of weeks — and the children got better at hiding, sharing their spaces and cramming into nooks and corners that shouldn't have been able to fit them, that shouldn't have hidden them so completely from view. They pulled each other in and held each other tight, making room, keeping silent. 

He finished the statement on the train to Great Yarmouth. He really should have been preparing for the House of Wax, but he'd wanted to know how it ended. He needed to know what was so special about this statement that Martin wanted to share it with him. 

_Not important,_ he remembers thinking to himself. _Just nice._

The statement giver told of a day when the whole school hid, each older child taking responsibility for keeping younger ones safe. None of them should have had to, but together all of them did. When they came out of hiding, all the teachers were gone. 

Martin had included a handwritten note at the end of the statement: _I can't find any records of the school from after 1966. I tracked down the son, but he didn't have any more information. He took me to the grave to change the flowers._

Jon remembers imagining Martin solemnly helping a man he's never met before lay flowers on the grave of someone who fifty years earlier had been part of a moment that never fit into that framework of Spirals and Spiders and Strangers. He hadn't noticed at the time, but he remembers now his hand was pressed to his chest, feeling the beating of his heart. He hadn't noticed at the time, but he realises now the scars on his hand and his neck hurt a little less than normal. 

Well. That was all very nice, a memory he is glad to have back, but not the breakfast Jon needs. The first half of a quotation pops into his head: "I know you can't live on hope alone." 

He sets the tea on the table next to Daisy's phone and starts reading.

"Statement of Hazel Rutter regarding a fire in her childhood home. Original statement given August 9th, 1992. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Statement begins. 

"Hello, Jon. I’m assuming you’re alone; you always did prefer to read your statements in private. I wouldn’t try too hard to stop reading; there’s every likelihood you’ll just hurt yourself. So just listen. Now, shall we turn the page and try again?"

Jon tries to resist. Fails.

"Statement of Jonah Magnus regarding Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Statement begins.

"I hope you’ll forgive me the self-indulgence, but I have worked so very hard for this moment, a culmination of two centuries of work. It’s rare that you get the chance to monologue through another, and you can’t tell me you’re not curious.

"Why does a man seek to destroy the world?"

Something blooms inside Jon's mind, fully-formed and horrifying.

"It’s a simple enough answer: for immortality and power. Uninspired, perhaps, but – my god. The discovery, not simply of the dark and horrible reality of the world in which you live, but that you would quite willingly doom that world and confine the billions in it to an eternity of terror and suffering, all to ensure your own happiness, to place yourself beyond pain and death and fear."

 _Remember this,_ Daisy says, from the shadows by the water's edge. Jon hits play on her phone. _Statement regarding Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. A gift from a friend. This is a story about you._

_Martin appears to have assigned you a mug._

"Oh, sorry," Martin says, from the doorway. "I would have stayed out longer, it's just I noticed something weird—Jon?"

"Martin," Jon says. His hands are covering his mouth. There's blood on the table, on the floor. _This is a story about you._

The recording jerks back, replays. _This is a story about you._

"Shit," Martin says. " _Shit._ "

And then he's there; he's knocking away the pile of statements, he's trying to get Jon away from the clotting mess on the table. He's strong but not quite strong enough to hold Jon up physically, and they both end up on the floor by the open door, on the threshold between inside and out. Something smells sweet. Daisy's voice says again, _Martin appears to have assigned you a mug_ , and then stops. Jon breathes and chokes on blood and breathes again. In and out, over and over. Clean air; the scent of wild things. Martin's presence, as steady as it was through the long night. 

"What happened?" Martin asks, after a few minutes. "What did you do?"

"I almost," Jon says. At a great distance from himself, he notes that he isn't laughing or crying but somewhere in between. "I almost did something… very bad."

"What?" Martin asks.

"Something bad." Jon leans away from him for a moment. "Why did you come back early?"

Martin gives him an embarrassed look, then presses a bunch of stems into his hand. "I wanted to show you these."

Wildflowers: rue, meadowsweet, heart's ease. Jon's fingers curl around them, crushing them into petals and scent. _But without hope,_ he thinks, completing the quotation, _life is not worth living._

"They were by the water's edge," Martin says, sounding confused. "In October. Why is everything blooming in October?"

Jon will tell him. About the flowers, and the thing with the feathers, and Daisy. For now he stays where he is, letting Martin hold him, quiet and still. Around them, there is the turning world: the heart's ease, the sea's edge and the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments, kudos and [reblogs](https://dearthoughthenightisgone.tumblr.com/post/621471944799322112/cover-image-of-wildflowers-and-grey-beachin-the) all much appreciated!
> 
> Many thanks to cosmic_llin for the Welsh, and to Verity for supplying relevant plots in The Archers!
> 
> Please check out this [GORGEOUS fanart](https://skyberia.tumblr.com/post/621634102847766528/) by skyberia/sealioncaves and [this ALSO GORGEOUS fanart](https://the-east-art.tumblr.com/post/627365309509206016/in-the-chillest-land-and-on-the-strangest-sea-hope) by easternCriminal!
> 
> Title from ["Hope" is the thing with feathers](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314) by Emily Dickinson. Uncredited "I know you cannot live on hope alone" quotation is from [a speech by Harvey Milk](https://speakola.com/political/harvey-milk-hope-speech-1977).
> 
> We're very happy for people to make fanworks inspired by or in any other way related to this story - remixes, podfics, sequels, critiques, commentaries, anything - as long as you credit us, and we'd love it if you could drop us a link to your finished product but that bit is not obligatory.


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